


He Never Told Anyone Atlantis Dances In His Dreams

by soleta



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Alternate Reality, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multiple Pairings, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-06-13
Updated: 2006-06-13
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:32:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soleta/pseuds/soleta
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Atlantis, the prizefighting AU. kill me now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He Never Told Anyone Atlantis Dances In His Dreams

Atlantis is known all over the sector for one thing: their prize rings. The galactic heavyweight championships are held at Atlantis every year, and in between are the featherweight, the lightweight, the bantam weight, and the welterweight prize matches. For vistor entertainment, or maybe just so they don't get bored, their Atlantis-based fighters will stage matches at the drop of a hat.

 _Come to Atlantis,_ their fliers say. They're up in every shithole and rathouse in the sector, in flight lounges and charnel houses, in careful houses with discreet signs for the discerning gentleman. They are everywhere. They are egalitarian. _Come to Atlantis. Come to watch. Come to fight. Ronon is here._

Ronon's the champion heavyweight for two galaxies. The commoners believe that his dreadlocks are enough to strike fear into the heart of his enemy before he ever lands a hit. He's killed two men in the ring; one died of a hemorrhage in the brain. He'd died screaming, Carson said grimly to Elizabeth one day when they were alone together. He'd died seeing things. The other man had been last year's challenger to the heavyweight title. Ronon hadn't been intending to kill him (and when Ronon decided you should die, you were a dead man walking) but the challenger had touched Teyla, lust in his eyes. Rumor was, the guy liked to break his women. Unfortunately for him, he couldn't have done a stupider thing if he'd tried. Ronon took him apart. Literally.

Elizabeth had a hard time finding challengers after that.

Ronon has an unsettling habit of watching Teyla, following Teyla, just happening to show up in the same room as Teyla. After Elizabeth had watched this for a while in concern, she'd finally asked Teyla about it.

"Doesn't it bother you?" she said. "He's always after you."

Teyla just smiles, that ineffable look on her face, and looks at Ronon, who is currently in an arm-wrestling match with John Sheppard. Sheppard has never won a single match, but he keeps trying anyway; Elizabeth thinks that it might be the hot weight of Ronon's hand in his. So does Rodney, by the look of things; he's on a mission to never leave John alone with Ronon.

"I don't mind," Teyla says, finally. "It keeps him on a tight rein." She smiles again, brilliantly, and Elizabeth is forced to look away before she says something she'll regret. "He would never hurt me, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth's forced to agree. She really thinks that if Ronon hadn't had an overdeveloped sense of pride, he would have licked her boots for a chance.

It's sad, somehow.

Elizabeth knows better. She can't afford to show weakness or hesitation or doubt, or Kavanagh and Caldwell will cut her off at the knees. When she needs something more than her fingers can offer, she visits a lady so discreet that everyone on Atlantis knows who she is and thinks none the less of her for it. After all, people say, it's the oldest profession in all of the worlds. _Somebody's_ got to do it.

Laura Cadman would never have imagined herself in this role, but now that she's here, she can't imagine being anywhere else. She takes in the lonely, the nervous, the over-stimulated prizefighters, and she makes them each her own, if only for a night. She loves them all. Some of them don't ever come back after the first night, but that's okay. They're still hers. Others live on Atlantis and come to her regularly. She would never dream of fucking and telling, but someone must have seen something, because one day Rodney shows up at her door ready to pitch a fit.

"Rodney," she says, smiling calmly. "Please, come in."

He brushes past her and crosses his arms, waiting for her to close the door. She does; turning, she leans against the door and raises her eyebrows.

It's not that she doesn't know exactly why he's here; Rodney is an entertaining man, especially in the middle of a diatribe. She wants him to get on with it, to hurt if he means to, so she can start healing all the faster.

"John came to you," Rodney says, a little red in the face.

"John came to me," she agrees. She's so calm that he's nothing to start with, and he looks lost. Laura takes pity on him. "Didn't you know? He wanted you to come with." It's perfectly true; John had shown up one night talking in circles. It had taken her longer than it should to understand what he wanted. She pushes off the wall and moves over to Rodney, standing as close as she can without actually touching him. "He wanted the _three_ of us," Laura whispers sadly. "You fucking me fucking him fucking you. All of us." She presses a light kiss to his jaw. "Together."

Rodney steps back, and Laura thinks for a moment that she's lost him, but then he reaches for her, and she laughs.

Rodney and John have been an acknowledged fact since the day Rodney came to interview for a mechanic job. He'd just stepped out of the transporter when alarms start to blare, painting the hallway red, and every door in half of Atlantis slammed shut with no warning. Rodney counts himself lucky that he's on the right side of the door.

It's chaos in the control room, fifty people shouting fifty different things, contradicting each other, talking over and around each other until they're louder than the newly-installed sirens blaring away in the background. Radios are crackling in the background, and one furious woman is shouting at them from a glass-walled office down the hall, demanding answers or solutions or heads on platters.

Rodney can be pretty loud when he wants to be. Right now, he has to. He cuts them all off in midsentence, shouting at the top of his lungs, and when they turn to him in astonishment and hostility, he abuses them impartially into giving him status reports.

He'd learned from his father. He'd learned from the best.

They tell him nothing worth the learning until the shortest man in the room with glasses that had to have been thirty years old cuts someone else off in midsentence to tell Rodney that there are people literally trapped in the doors all over the city and that this has never happened before. The controls are less responsive than a transvestite hooker on thorazine - Rodney's metaphor, not the other guy's, who looks like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, and who cares if it's a bad one, anyway?

Rodney saves the day through his own genius. Elizabeth Weir hires him, but not for the tech job he'd applied for; instead, she gives him the entire department, bumping the guy with the glasses down to second head.

He passes some guy with a gun and ridiculous hair coming out of Weir's glass-walled office. They trade looks, measuring, judging, deciding the pecking order all in one glance.

Rodney got something else out of that glance.

He goes away and sets himself up with the best room he can find that people aren't physically occupying at the moment and 'accidentally' runs into the guy the next day in the employee dining hall. They nod at each other like the manly, manly men they are and Rodney carries away his tray, fully satisfied with his progress.

They're fucking by the second week. Rodney still doesn't know the guy's first name, but he knows Sheppard's cock like the back of his hand, the heat of his skin, the way he tenses when he's about to come. He's quiet, just a curse or two, but just those couple words hit Rodney like a fucking earthquake and he always comes and comes and comes, drowning in Sheppard.

All in all, Rodney likes Atlantis. He'll have to put a stop to his hostile takeover plans, and not only because Sheppard would be displeased and withhold the sex.

The skinny guy with the hideous glasses has no name that anyone can actually pronounce. He insists that they call him Timkins and will never explain why, despite every person on Atlantis asking him at least once (and Rodney asks him far, far more than once, in the hopes that simple annoyance will do the job. Unfortunately, he's wrong.)

Timkins has a little girl at home, seven years old, bright and full of shining life. He thinks of her when they're in trouble, when he's alone, when he looks at Elizabeth the right way. When he hears the rain falling.

He loves his daughter, and it keeps him strong.

One day, Timkins and Sheppard are caught in a cage of rubble on the north pier, cut off from the rest of Atlantis, from the sea, from the sky. To calm his nerves, Sheppard kicks Timkins into talking about himself.

It doesn't take much for him to spill everything about his daughter. He'd have pulled out pictures if he'd had them, but he makes do.

Sheppard is typically uncommunicative, but he has to prod before Sheppard will answer his questions. In the course of the afternoon, he finds out that Sheppard is a John and a latent wrestling fan. He'd originally come to Atlantis for the yearly open tryouts, when thousands of people, male and female, came from all over two galaxies for the chance to face Ronon.

John's still the skinniest of the lot. The bookkeepers seed him second to last with long odds that nobody will take; at least, not until he starts to win. He fights with a kind of controlled desperation that makes the professionals shake their heads and mutter about burning out. He fights dirty when he has to, he fights hard, he fights desperate, but he always fights. And he wins one match after another until he's at the top of his session.

Weir calls him into her office one day and says to him abruptly, "You will never be a wrestler."

John feels his face go sullen, despite his best efforts, and he leans back in his chair to give himself a moment to think beyond the obvious retort.

"You will never be a wrestler," she says again, softly. There's a river of pity in her eyes and John wants to smash her face in. "You're built wrong. They would break you in half."

"You let me get this far," John says, suddenly furious. "You let me get all the way to the top before you said something."

Weir sits back in her chair disconcertedly and taps her fingers for a minute. "I want to offer you a job," she says after a minute. "If you're very, very lucky, you could shoot things."

Despite himself, John's attention is caught. "Really?"

Over the years, he behaves (or at least he never gets caught) and is promoted, time and again, until he's in joint command of Atlantis with Weir.

They all think he's crazy when he tells them that Atlantis talks to him. They're only half-right; Atlantis really is talking to him. It knows that it should have been different, somehow. It knows that this isn't right.

 _Somewhere it's all different_ , it tells John and anyone else that'll listen in their sleep. _Somewhere, I matter._


End file.
